Identifying Dirac cones in carbon allotropes with square symmetry.

A theoretical study is conducted to search for Dirac cones in two-dimensional carbon allotropes with square symmetry. By enumerating the carbon atoms in a unit cell up to 12, an allotrope with octatomic rings is recognized to possess Dirac cones under a simple tight-binding approach. The obtained Dirac cones are accompanied by flat bands at the Fermi level, and the resulting massless Dirac-Weyl fermions are chiral particles with a pseudospin of S = 1, rather than the conventional S = 1∕2 of graphene. The spin-1 Dirac cones are also predicted to exist in hexagonal graphene antidot lattices.